I had no idea when a high relic had last been used in Loraille. A hundred years ago, perhaps more. The need for them had faded with time. The Clerisy might have decided that training more aspirants wasn’t worth the risk.
If there was no one else…
“Those people were traveling north because of me,” I heard myself say. “They heard about what happened in Naimes, and they think I can help them. They think I’m a saint.”
“They might be right. You’re horrid and annoying enough to be one. As far as I can tell, that seems to be the criteria.”
I barely heard it speak. This is the Lady’s will. That was what Sister Julienne had told me in the crypt. What if she hadn’t just meant saving the convent? It didn’t seem like a coincidence that people needed help, and I was here, traveling right past them, the only person in Loraille who had wielded a high relic within living memory.
But I wasn’t a saint. I wasn’t even trained. I remembered enough fleeting snatches of the days following the battle to know that the revenant had succeeded in at least partially taking over my body. Without the sisters’ efforts, it would have possessed me. And if it had done so, the consequences would have been catastrophic. I had felt its violent intentions as though they had been my own. It would have slain the sisters without a second thought.
And yet another of its emotions dominated my memories, stronger than its rage, its resentment, its hunger—stronger than all of them combined.
Fear.
I watched the light cast shifting patterns on the harrow’s wall, turning an idea over in my mind like a dagger’s blade, examining it for nicks and scratches. And then I asked, “Revenant, is it true you’ll do anything not to go back into your reliquary?”
SIX
Peering through the harrow’s screen the next morning, the revenant said, “That idiot priest has no idea what he’s doing, riding with my reliquary out in the open. Do you see, nun? We’re being followed.”
Outside, the rising sun glared above the treetops, burning away the fog that blanketed the road. Still sticky-headed with sleep, I took a moment to spot what the revenant was referring to: a ripple in the fog, similar to the eddies stirred by the trotting horses. As I watched, I made out a translucent shape furtively slipping away.
“A gaunt,” the revenant supplied. “It’s being used as a scout. They’ll attack soon. That will be our best chance to escape.”
Leander rode ahead of us, surrounded by knights wearing suits of consecrated armor. I couldn’t tell whether the stab of dislike I felt at the sight of him belonged to me or the revenant.
After what I had learned yesterday, it seemed obvious that the spirits would continue trying to destroy Saint Eugenia’s relic. But unlike me, Leander hadn’t stayed awake half the night interrogating a revenant.
I leaned toward the screen, trying to catch a glimpse of his onyx ring. “He has a powerful relic—it binds a penitent. Won’t he notice that something’s wrong? Will the penitent warn him?”
The revenant hissed a laugh. “Not unless he calls it forth, and I doubt he can afford to use it casually. Look at the way he’s sitting. He has to mortify himself to control it.”
“He has to what?”
A flicker of surprise came from the revenant, followed by a wary pause, as though it was wondering whether it had accidentally revealed too much. Finally, it said, “It’s what humans do when the spirits bound to their relics try to resist them. There are a fascinating number of different techniques. Whips, hair shirts, girdles of thorns. Sleeping on beds of nails used to be quite popular. I had one vessel who would kneel on gravel for hours, reciting prayers—I gather the intent was to vanquish me through boredom.” Suspicion crept into its tone. “You weren’t practicing mortification when you used your dagger on yourself in the crypt?”
“Not on purpose,” I said, glancing at the fading marks on my wrist. “I just assumed you wouldn’t like it.”
“How delightful. Being horrid must come naturally to you.”
I shrugged, not disagreeing. I was already thinking about doing worse. Despite the agreement we’d arrived at last night, I knew I couldn’t trust the revenant to uphold its end of the bargain. Now that I no longer had my misericorde, I might have to resort to other measures to keep it under control. I was certain I could manage something. Sleeping on a bed of nails couldn’t be much worse than sharing a room with Marguerite.
The revenant continued talking, but I had stopped listening, studying Leander. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be a physical explanation for his stiff, straight-backed posture. He had looked that way even back in Naimes.
He seemed young to be wielding such a powerful relic. By that fact alone, I wondered if he was one of only a few people capable of controlling it. If it could have gone to someone older and more experienced, it likely would have. I knew little about penitents, only that they were rare even for Fourth Order spirits—so much so that they hadn’t been included in our lessons. Relics binding them had to be even rarer; the Clerisy likely went to great efforts to find suitable candidates to wield them.
I remembered how disdainfully Leander had spoken of lesser relics. Ironically, if he weren’t too arrogant to wield a First Order relic like Sister Iris and Mother Katherine, he wouldn’t need to limit its use, and he would have been able to sense the gaunt spying on us.
Mother Katherine. Without warning, the memory flashed through my mind: Sister Iris’s scream, Mother Katherine limp in her arms. None of my fragmented memories of lying fevered in bed afterward included her, only Sister Iris and the other nuns. Mother Katherine should have been there. If she could have, she would have come.
I couldn’t think about that, not now. I wrenched my mind away and stared hard at my hands, turning them palms-up in my lap, summoning the memory of heat and agony and letting it wash over me in a blistering wave, burning everything else to ashes.
“What are you thinking about?” the revenant broke in, its voice low and venomous. I realized I had been silent for several minutes.
“Nothing.” I sincerely didn’t want to talk about it.
“You’re lying,” it hissed. “There’s always something going on in your detestable nun brain. You’re going to betray me, aren’t you? You’re already thinking about breaking your promise.”
“What?” At first the revenant’s accusation merely surprised me. Then a lump of anger formed in my throat. “No, I’m not.”
“If you imagine that you can fool me—”
“You’ve spent the past week trying to take over my body. Of the two of us, I should be more worried about you betraying me.”
“Ha!” The revenant dragged itself up. I felt it stalking around the confines of my mind like a caged beast. Then it hissed savagely, “You have no idea what you’ve offered. You promised that if I helped you, you would do everything in your power to keep me from returning to my reliquary. Do you truly understand what that means? What you’re sacrificing?”
Unfortunately, I did. It meant that I was stuck with the revenant indefinitely. My soul would never know a moment’s peace. I would suffer a miserable, profane, defiled existence, constantly on guard against possession, poisoned by incense and consecrated steel.
But it was right. Perhaps I hadn’t realized the worst part after all. Back when I’d made the offer, I hadn’t known the revenant would talk so much.
It still hadn’t stopped. Now it was saying spitefully, “Before, you used the possibility of an eternity trapped in your company to threaten me.”
“I know how you felt when we fought in the chapel,” I said through gritted teeth. “You miss feeling things. You like being in a human body.”
“That doesn’t mean I want to be in yours!”
The last of my patience evaporated. “Then we can forget about last night.” My voice sounded like a death knell. “You can go back into your reliquary. Maybe you’ll never get another vessel. How long do you think it will take Saint Eugenia’s relic to disintegrate? Hu
ndreds more years, probably. That’s a long time to be imprisoned inside—”
“Stop!” the revenant cried. I felt a painful scrabbling clutch, as though it had sunk its claws into my insides. “Stop,” it hissed again, more quietly this time, even though I already had.
I waited, then asked, “Are you finished?”
“The shackles,” it muttered after a pause. “When the spirits attack, we need to rid you of these shackles, or else we’ll both be next to useless. And my reliquary—we’ll need to retrieve it as well. If the humans believe that I’ve possessed you, they might decide to destroy it.”
I opened my mouth to argue that the Clerisy would never consider destroying a high relic. Then my eyes fell on the shackles’ holy symbols. I swallowed my words.
The revenant might not behave the way I had expected, but it had slaughtered thousands of people. Tens of thousands, the populations of entire cities. It would do all of that over again in a heartbeat if it gained control of my body. The devastation in Roischal was only a shadow of the terror it had wreaked during the War of Martyrs. To prevent that from happening again, the Clerisy would destroy Saint Eugenia’s relic if they had no other choice.
With the revenant’s power, I could save everyone. But if I lost control, I might burn the world to ashes.
I found it difficult to believe that this was truly what the Lady wanted. In all probability, it wasn’t, and She was merely making do with what She had. Which was, unfortunately for everyone, me.
I had come too far to start having second thoughts. We did need to take the reliquary with us, and not just for the reason the revenant had suggested. If it tried to possess me again, I might be able to resist its power for long enough to destroy the relic myself as a last resort. The bone had looked old and brittle enough to crush in my hand.
“All right,” I said aloud, before it could grow suspicious. “I’ll think of a way to get the priest close to us. He’s the one carrying the key.” Somehow I knew that to be true. Leander wouldn’t entrust it to anyone else.
* * *
By the time the sun reached its zenith, I still hadn’t come up with a strategy to lure him into the harrow. The revenant was growing increasingly impatient, pacing back and forth in my head as it pointed out every spirit that it noticed in the fog.
“Whatever you plan on doing, hurry. They’re close enough that I can sense them even through these accursed shackles.”
I was wondering whether I should finally admit that I didn’t have a plan when a raven’s raucous cawing erupted outside. A horse whinnied, and one of the knights swore. I straightened in my seat. Something about the raven’s cries sounded familiar. Looking through the screen, I couldn’t see anything useful: a knight had ridden close to the harrow, and his armor filled my field of vision. As I watched, he raised his arm as though to fend off an attack. Another flurry of heckling caws followed.
“It’s just a bird,” Leander snapped. “Stay in formation.”
Wingbeats flapped past. “Pretty bird!” the raven shrieked defiantly.
I tried to stand up, only to get jerked back down by the shackles. “Trouble.”
“Oh, do you think so?” the revenant hissed. “Aside from an impending attack by spirits for which we are completely unprepared?”
“No, that’s the raven’s name. Trouble.” His timing didn’t strike me as a matter of chance. “The Lady must have sent him to help us.”
“I would be interested to know how many hours daily you nuns spend inhaling incense. Clearly, it has an effect on your brains.”
I ignored it, listening carefully to the knights’ disgruntled shouts, the chaotic jingling of tack. It sounded like Trouble was diving from the sky, spooking the horses.
I wasn’t worried about his safety. My favorite book in the scriptorium was a collection of parables describing the gruesome fates of wrongdoers who had offended the Lady by harming Her sacred birds. Even the knights wouldn’t dare hurt a raven. As the knight blocking the screen rode past, I saw another waving his scabbard in the air, futilely attempting to shoo Trouble away.
Their efforts were in vain. At last, infuriated, Leander called out orders to stop the harrow. As it slowly bumped to a halt, I heard him issue a few more indistinct commands. The loud, grinding vibration of the winch drowned out the rest. I clambered to the floor and crouched there, watching the links rattle into the mechanism.
After the winch stilled, the metal slot in the door slammed open, and a tin cup slid inside. I dragged it over with my foot and gulped down the cold, metallic water. When the knight reopened the slot, the empty cup wasn’t waiting for him.
Eyes appeared on the other side, shadowed and unreadable behind the grille of a helmet’s visor. I slid the cup partway across the floor, almost close enough for him to reach.
“I need to speak to the priest.”
A long silence emanated from the knight. He had probably been instructed not to speak to me. I pushed the cup the rest of the way over.
“There’s something I need to confess.”
He took the cup. The eyes vanished, and the slot dropped shut. I waited, hoping Leander wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation. I was rewarded a moment later when the bolts began to slide open on the door.
“There’s something else,” the revenant said quickly. “You can’t let anyone find out that we’re talking to each other, or that I’m helping you willingly. If we’re ever caught, pretend…” I felt it bristling as it forced out the rest. “Pretend that you subdued me, and I’m under your control.”
I’d rather not. People truly would believe I was a saint if I made such a claim. But it was right—if anyone found out that we were cooperating, not just the revenant with me, but also the reverse, an exorcism would be the least of my worries. I might even face burning at the stake for heresy. I nodded to show that I’d understood.
The door swung open, flooding the harrow with light. I resisted the instinct to cringe away from the glare and faced the figure standing there with watering eyes. Even through a blur of tears, the tall, spare silhouette unmistakably belonged to Leander. I wondered what he saw in return as his gaze swept over me. My robes stank of sweat, and my unbraided hair hung lank and greasy to the floor. No doubt he found the image satisfying. He had wanted to see me humbled at his feet in Naimes, and he had finally succeeded, though it had taken a chain and shackles to bend me to his will.
The harrow dipped beneath his weight as he stepped inside. His robes blocked out the sun, bringing into focus the key ring hanging from his belt beside his censer. One of the keys looked old and tarnished, a possible match for the shackles.
“That one,” the revenant confirmed.
“You may speak,” Leander said, as though I had been waiting for his permission. “What is it you wish to tell me?”
He sounded composed, but I noticed that he was standing just outside the distance I could reach him if I suddenly lunged to the end of the chain. My gaze traveled up from the key ring, past the glittering jewels of Saint Eugenia’s reliquary, and finally to his face. As I met his eyes, I caught a flicker of emotion in their depths, there and gone again, like the flash of a fish’s scales vanishing into a dark pool.
“Stop wasting time,” the revenant hissed. “What is your plan? Don’t tell me you’re making this up as you go along.”
I racked my brain for something to say, and my thoughts returned inevitably to Sister Iris’s scream, the sight of Mother Katherine limp before the altar. “I want to know what happened to the sisters in Naimes. Were any of them injured in the attack?”
“Am I speaking to Artemisia, or the revenant?” Leander returned coolly.
“Can’t you tell?”
Our eyes were still locked. He looked away first. “You seem to be in command of yourself, but it can be difficult to tell for certain. Spirits study the human world through their vessels, growing more cunning with each person they inhabit.”
A hoarse muttering sound came from above. Trouble ha
d landed on the harrow. His claws pattered across the roof, and Leander tensed, a reaction that might have been a flinch in someone less controlled. Whatever he had seen in the past weeks in Roischal couldn’t have been pleasant to have affected even him. The shadows beneath his eyes looked deeper inside the harrow.
But he continued smoothly, “If a spirit as old and experienced as the revenant were to take over your body, it could impersonate you so skillfully that even the sisters who raised you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Until it ceased the act, and killed them.”
“Unlikely. I would rather spend another hundred years in my reliquary than try to impersonate you. I’d go straight for the killing.”
I received the impression that I was going to have to get used to ignoring it in the middle of important conversations. Through clenched teeth, I asked, “Even if I were possessed, how could it be dangerous to tell me?”
“Speaking to you at all is a risk.”
“But you came anyway.”
Leander’s hand twitched—the one wearing the onyx ring. He looked at me again, his expression impossible to read. Then he said in a low, intense voice, “Right now you should be receiving instruction in Bonsaint. You could have had anything you wanted. Instead, you’re chained inside a harrow, tormented by a spirit you might have one day learned to control.”
“You have no idea what I want,” I countered.
“You’ve seen nothing of the world save a convent and the miserable little town in which you were born. I think it’s possible that you don’t know what you want.”
I gazed back at him expressionlessly. “I want to know what happened to the sisters.”
Forgetting himself, he took a step forward. “You should have listened to me,” he said. “If you had come with me—”
“Nun,” the revenant broke in urgently, at the same time I snarled, “Everyone at my convent would be dead!” I threw myself to the end of the chain, the bite of the shackles drawing me up short.
Vespertine Page 7